Heroes Of The Storm, Ending Player Hostility One Lane At A Time

A hostile player atmosphere is becoming increasingly common in games these days, especially highly competitive games under the FPS or MOBA category. Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard’s upcoming MOBA isn’t even out yet, but it’s only natural that this sort of atmosphere plagues it as well.

In an interview with Eurogamer, the game’s lead designer Dustin Browder talks about the development team is working hard towards making the play experience an enjoyable one for everyone and moving player hostility completely out of the picture.

The former StarCraft 2 lead designer states that Blizzard will “keep attacking this problem until it’s gone.”

Browder’s vision of this situation seems admirable but also sounds highly naïve without resorting to some extreme case scenarios like in Hearthstone, where there is no way to chat with other players without first adding them as friends.

Heroes of the Storms’ unique feature, shared XP between team members promotes teamwork and discourages people from playing as lone wolves thereby decreasing the hostility towards such solo-ers

This, however, raises another huge question, if players cannot really go head to head against another, how will they ever find out who is better at what, which is kind of the purpose of such a competitive category of gaming.

“Shared XP also has this huge benefit for high-end teams in the sense they can cross-lane support or cross-lane gank with a lot more freedom.” Bowder said.

Browder admits there is more to be done, both team and individual-wise, acknowledging the fact that in shared XP games, there really is no MVP at the end of the match, thus not giving credit when someone truly deserves it.